July 26, 2012 11:51am EDTJuly 23, 2012 8:16pm EDTYear after year, Florida State is expected to rule the ACC and challenge for a national title. Turns out, the Seminoles weren't for real. So guess who is conference favorite? Yep, E.J. Manuel and his teammates.

GREENSBORO, N.C.—The trick, Florida State defensive end Brandon Jenkins says, is to have fun while dealing with expectations. It’s possible to make the two things co-exist, even if they most certainly did not last season for the Seminoles.

“That’s the point of the game of football, to have fun,” Jenkins said. “If you’re not having fun, other things can happen. I felt like last year, Wake Forest and Clemson, we were a little down from the Oklahoma game and we weren’t having fun. That’s the main thing. This year, we’re taking it one game at a time, just focusing and having fun.”

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Losing three consecutive games tends to take the fun out of football. Sometimes, lessons are learned in a constructive, uplifting manner. That wasn’t the case for FSU.

“We were ranked, what, No. 4 or No. 5 last year?,” Jenkins said. “We hadn’t been ranked that high in a while, and we didn’t know how to handle it, a little bit. This year we’re more experienced, we have great leaders like E.J. (Manuel) and a lot of seniors. We’re teaching the young guys. We’re focused this year. Don’t let the expectations and the hype distract you.”

Well, the hype is back. Again.

For a couple years now, coach Jimbo Fisher has been expected to lift the Seminoles back into the national championship picture, but for one reason or another, the ascension has been delayed.

So, maybe this is finally the year. The expectations are already in place.

At the ACC media days in Greensboro, N.C., Florida State was picked as the overwhelming preseason favorite, with 60 votes—Virginia Tech was second with 18 and Clemson was third at 13.

“They’re a great team. They’re probably the best team in this conference,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said of the Seminoles. “They’re loaded with talent, they’re well-coached, they’re recruiting at a high level, they’ve got a bunch of guys back, so that was a good vote on (the media’s) part. They had a great finish, and they’ve got a lot of players back.”

After that three-game losing streak, the Seminoles won seven of their final eight games, a stretch that ended with an 18-14 victory over Notre Dame in the Champs Sports Bowl.

“Somebody asked me the other day, ‘What’s your definition of success?’ ” Fisher said. “I think that’s reaching your full potential. And, at times last year, for what they overcame, it was successful in a lot of ways. Now, it wasn’t as successful in the way we wanted it to be. The overall record wasn’t as successful as we wanted it to be. The key for a coach and for players is to understand why things are happening and to adjust from them that way. I think those experiences will only help them that way.”

Part of the equation, Fisher says, is “eliminating clutter.” Twitter was a clutter casualty. After a couple of embarrassing incidents over the past few seasons, the coach has banned his team from the social media medium. It’s a decree, he said on Monday, that will almost certainly last throughout the season.

Another part of the equation, Manuel says, is practicing better.

“It’s the consistency factor,” said the Seminoles quarterback, who was picked third in the ACC preseason player of the year vote. “Just cleaning things up in practice, because that’s where I feel we came up short. Mistakes that we made that cost us games were things that we didn’t do well in practice. If we can clean those things up and adhere to what Coach Fisher is saying …”

If they can adhere, these Seminoles can be very, very good. If they can have fun, they can be very, very good. And if they can finally meet expectations, that would be very, very good for a program that desperately wants to take the next step.